How to Recover From a Decrease in Keywords and Organic Traffic

It can be very concerning when your rankings and organic traffic decrease, especially when you can’t figure out why. Without knowing the cause you can’t really figure out how to recover from the decrease.

If you are counting on that organic traffic to make sales or conversion on your website, it can become a highly stressful time. You also need to find answers quickly to get your website back on track.

There are a number of different things that could be causing your drop in keywords and organic traffic. But the good news is that there are a few solid ways that work to try and recover the lost keywords and traffic.

So, have a read on below at some of the reasons why your keywords and organic traffic has decreased and how you can best recover from it:

Algorithm Change

One of the most common forms of a decrease in keywords and organic traffic is from an algorithm change. Google makes changes to their algorithm all the time, some are big changes and some a smaller. It is a good idea to follow Google on Twitter, as they tend to announce when a major algorithm update has occurred.

It can certainly be disheartening when you haven’t made any changes, but yet your keywords and organic traffic take a hit. The best course of action here is to ensure everything you are doing in the realm of SEO is in Google’s best practices.

Google algorithm updates tend to have a greater impact those not following the rules. This is because Google wants to ensure that their results page is only filled with quality sites. Also, when a big algorithm change has occurred you should do your reading and research to see the type of websites that have been impacted.

Website Redesign or Migration

It seems counter intuitive for this to have a negative impact on keywords and organic traffic, but this sometimes does happen. If you have redesigned your website or migrated it from one place to another, Google is still trying to figure it out.

While Google is trying to understand what is going on, it might cause a drop. But if you have ensured a positive user experience on the new site, you should see your rankings return to normal (or hopefully even better than they were before). You will just have to give it some time.

Your Competitors

You always need to keep a close eye on your competitors, for a number of different reasons, one of which being that they could be performing negative SEO on your website. This is something you have to be on the look out for.

Negative SEO takes its shape in many different forms, one of the most common being your competitor putting your website’s link on a bad website. If Google sees you are associated with a bad website, it could be the reason you have dropped in rankings. To mitigate this you need to perform regular backlink audits.

Changing URLs or Website Address

If you change your URLs or website address and don’t perform a proper redirect, then all the backlinks the previous URL has gained will be lost. Without any backlinks, this could be a reason why you have seen a drop in your rankings and organic traffic.

It is important to be very careful when it comes to changing URLs and it might even be better to enlist the assistance of a professional SEO agency like this one if you are looking to do major URL changes, to ensure that all the work you did for the old URLs is transferred to your new ones.